How To Measure The Effectivity of Your SEO

A lot commercial website owners hire SEO practitioners to do the technical work for them. Because most business owners do not have time to read raw data and unstructured reports to know if their marketing efforts are working just fine or they are just wasting time and resources. They only care about the results of the efforts have been made for the benefits of their business.
While it is definitely hard to read raw data from Google Analytics for example, and in various traffic monitoring platforms, there are still crucial elements of success that every business owners can track to see if the resources being spent over the SEO activities are worth to invest.
These elements of success should be generated from month to month, quarter to quarter or even year to year. This can be done in seasonal campaign but it still depends on your KPIs which can give you insightful information.

Search impression for your targeting keywords

Search impressions are important for webmasters. They need to know whether their website pages appear in multiple keywords related to their pages or not. This gives them hints if their pages appear in search queries they are not targeting but closely related to their pages.
You can track this performance in your Google Search Console property, assuming that you are logged in to your Google Account. You can set the dates in comparison to previous reporting period, date range specific such as in one week, couple of days and so on.

You can then see what keywords people are using that triggers your website to appear in search results. This query reports from Google search console can be downloaded straight from your search console property to see the whole reporting data. Again, the date covered can be date-sensitive depending on your data needs.

Why you need to track this?

You need to know whether your priority keywords are appearing in search impressions

You need to know which keyword is giving most impression to your web page in SERPs

You need to know how many search impression a particular page of your website can get from search.

Search traffic through your targeting keywords

As part of knowing if your SEO efforts are really helping you drive traffic from search. You can track this performance from your Search Console or in Google Analytics account to see the whole data of your search traffic.
Since we are tracking the search traffic through our keyword targeting, you have to make sure that branded search are excluded from your reports through filtered view in Google Analytics. In Google Search Console, branded search are by default added and can be excluded only if imported to excel and you have to do it yourself.
Why you need to track this?

You need to know if your keyword targeting are performing in driving organic search.

You need to know which of your keywords are in need of extra effort for better performance.

To see if your brand is out-trafficking your target keywords.

Improvement of your search traffic

One of the major purpose of doing SEO for any website is to consistently improve search traffic. As a business owner, one of the best KPI aside from conversion is search traffic to see if you have any traffic to convert. Google Search Console and Google Analytics can help you provide the data you need.
You can compare the traffic from month over month or whichever date range you prefer that can give you insightful data. You can also compare traffic from counties to countries, or even devices to devices. Again, the data available in Google Search Console is downloadable so you can see the whole picture of your search traffic data.

So for example, if you have created a resources on your website such as a study of A/B Testing or you just made a comparison of hosting differences websites for 2016, you can check their traffic performance versus the previous months to see if they actually performed in getting traffic from search.
If search traffic play a huge contribution in your business performance, tracking and comparing search traffic in a regular basis is highly important.You can also get advance insightful information that you can use to improve your search traffic. For instance, you created a list of top 10 experts to follow or technical guidelines in web development, you can see which one will attract readers and you can do more of it.
Why this is important

You can know if your SEO efforts are working for you.

You can know which of your SEO efforts are helping you perform better.

You can see which pages of your website are in need of improvement

Improvement of your search visibility

Another important contribution of SEO for a website is to consistently improve a website’s search visibility. Whether organic ranking, knowledge graph results or even in quick answer snippet featured, you need to follow what’s happening in the industry to see if your website is coping up with the changes.
Consistently, you need your website increase its ranking from current position all the way to the top. Proven by data, getting the number 1 spot in Google Search Results can give you boost in organic traffic for your targeted keyword. Throughout the months, you should see your website position in Google getting up as you invest to your SEO campaign because if not, your SEO practitioner might not be doing it right.
Fortunately, not only getting the number 1 spot can help you drive organic traffic. Google has also enabled their quick answer feature box in organic search for question-related query. James Perrott has written an article about everything you need to know in Google Answer Boxes, you can check it out if you want to learn more of it.

Also, Google has made an extra effort to require webmasters to implement accelerated mobile pages for mobile search users. But this is only for websites with news content or section in the website. Google has also provided a complete instructions on how to set it up the right way.

Conversion from your search traffic

Business owners only look at the results of any activities. They need to know if they did get any results or benefits from the efforts that have been made. This is not because they are not interested but they just don’t have time for it. That’s the reason why they hire SEOs in the first place.
To see the results of your SEO investments for your website, Google Analytics can give you the data you need. You can see the total of goal completions with associated goal value that gives you indications whether you get a profit from a certain period of time.

Also, Google Analytics give you a feature where you can compare the goal conversion from a set of date range you preferred. You can see from comparison report whether your website is performing month over month. And you can make necessary actions based on the data you will see.

Why this is important

You need to know if your SEO investment is continuously giving you daily, weekly or monthly profit.

You need to know if your visitors are happy with your required steps prior to conversion

Conversion from other traffic sources

Conversion from other traffic sources is also a good indication of good SEO campaign. Since your SEO is not only driving targeted visitors to your website, but also converting the traffic driven. While this is not always possible to happen, it is still better if happening. Google Analytics can also give you this data available at hand.

Takeaways

Business owners are not technical savvy, they are not into learning every technical aspect of SEO. They just need to see the results behind the efforts that were made from their investments. However, they still need to know at least the basic of reading the data so they will know if their target is being met or if their goals are being achieved. The tips mentioned above about tracking the SEO results for a website are good jumpstart to give understanding of the results in

1 comment:

One thing that will go a long way in making your keywords successful will be making sure that these keywords are highly searched, and that they have very little in the way of competition, and if you are using keywords that are extremely broad, it is unlikely you will hit both of these points; use a keyword tool such as the one provided by Google to make sure the keywords you are using are specific rather than broad, as this will help you quite a bit in the long run.